How to Find Viral Infographic Topics (and Stats)

You already know that infographics are an awesome way to build links, brand awareness and traffic to your site. But just slapping together any old infographic isn’t going to cut it these days. This video will show you how you can find infographic topics that you know will perform well for you — and a few little-known places you can go to grab hard-hitting statistics that will make your infographic stand out.

Video Transcript

Hey what’s up everybody? It’s Brian Dean from Quick Sprout. In this video, I’m going to show you how to find viral infographic topics and then I’m going to show you where to go to find data to fill up your infographic. The biggest mistake people make with Infographic is choosing the wrong topic. Today I’m going to show you how to find some proven topics that you can build your infographic around.

The first place to look is visually, which is not visually.com, it’s visual.ly. This is actually the biggest infographic database on the internet. So, head over to their homepage and when you scroll down, you’ll see that they have a ‘topic’ section here.

For this example for the video, we’re going to pretend that you’re in the social media niche. If you don’t see your niche in this top “categories” area, click on the “more topics” button and it will reveal all the topics and categories that visual.ly has on their website.

Let’s click “social media” and this will show you some of the most popular social media infographics that they have had lately. But, you want to find the ones that have done well over time. This will give you an idea of what infographics tend to work best in your niche in terms of design and topic.

Head over to this “organize by” and you can choose either “liked” or “commented”. I like to choose “liked” but you can choose “commented.” They both show a lot of user interaction, basically proxy indicators of how popular the infographic was. As you can see here, they’re talking about the conversation prism, which is all about the different social media sites and how they interact, most powerful colors in the world, Instagram, following Twitter, things you can look at.

You want to spend a lot of time looking at which topics tend to do well in the social media niche and then you want to come up with something original. You don’t want to obviously copy someone’s topic. For example, “The Most Powerful Colors in the World.” This has obviously been done. What you may want to do is talk about how colors are used on social media, how they influence conversions, how they influence sign-up rates, how they influence click through rates in social media and things like that.

It’s actually a bit hard to keep track of because as you can see, they have 2,873 infographics on this topic alone. What I like to do is curate a private board on Pinterest to keep track of everything and I’ll show you how to set that up right now.

Head over to Pinterest. Click on your profile. And then create a new board. And put in a name. You can say, “social media infographic ideas”, choose whatever category you want. This is going to be private so it doesn’t really matter. Just for the sake of the video, we’ll put “tattoos”. Under “secret”, you flip the switch so it’s yes. That way you’re the only one that can see it. Then click “save changes”. Now we’ll create a private board that’s just for you and that’s a good way to keep track of any infographics you see that you really like. You can look at them all at once and that’s usually where inspiration is struck.

Now, head back to visual.ly. Click on an infographic, let’s say this one that you liked and have a Pinterest share button here. Click “pin it” and pin it to your social media infographic ideas board and that will be added to your board along with any other infographics that you find that you like.

So, once you have a few infographics in mind and a topic in mind, next place to go is GoogleNews. Head over to GoogleNews and put in a few of your target keywords. You can also use this strategy to mine ideas or refine an idea that you might have. Let’s say you’re in the internet marketing niche and you want to do a social media related infographic. You can put in “social media” here. Or, if you’re in the social media niche and you want to do something more specific or around specific social media website like Twitter or Facebook, you can go ahead and put the name of the social media network into GoogleNews.

As you can see here, Google News gives you some amazing topic ideas and statistics. For example, we see “Distasteful Side of Social Media.” This already is a great topic because it’s counter-intuitive to how most people view social media, which is over-overwhelmingly positive, especially when it comes to advertising and marketing. I see already that this has a tremendous amount of potential. Then we see a great statistic that you might want to use in your infographic, 1 in 10 young workers are rejected because of their social media. So, this is a great place to refine an idea or to find an idea if you don’t have any idea of what you want to write your infographic around.

Another place that I don’t see discussed very often to find infographic ideas is HARO. HARO is just short for “Help A Reporter Out”. It’s a website for journalists to find sources for their stories. You can sign up here for free and start pitching your business and journalism, potentially getting brand mentions, but that’s not how we’re going to use it today. What I like to use it for is to find hot topic ideas. These journalists have their ear to the ground, okay? If they’ve decided that they want to write their article in a national newspaper, they be better be sure it’s a great topic for an infographic.

So, you can log into HARO for free and once you’re here, put in a keyword. The search function here isn’t very good so usually you have to put in strange keywords like “online” or “social” if you want to find social media information. And I actually found one for the video. So, “Cleaning up your online presence before a job search”. As you saw, we already have this one right here, “1-in-10 young workers rejected because of their social media”, and then we see someone on a website, a national publication, writing something about how to clean up your online presence before a job search. Based on this, it looks like this might be a good topic. Teaching people how to be careful about how they present themselves online in case they’re about to apply for a job.

Once you found a topic, let’s say we’re going to go with that one, how do you find statistics? Because, obviously you can’t just make an infographic with tips. You can, obviously, but it tends to go a lot better if you have some data to support what you’re saying. That’s actually really easy to find. I just like to go over Google and put it your “keyword” + “study”. This brings up an amazing amount of resources that you can use to add data to your infographic.

There’s one right here: The Social Media Report by Nielsen. Imagine how many great statistics are inside of there. Social Media Study by the Social Media Examiner, which is an authority site. Here’s another one by Marketing Land: 76% of executives believe CEOs should be utilizing social media. If you just go through here, you can find some great data to support your infographic.

If you wanted to to go with the social media jobs idea, you can do something like, “social media jobs” + “study” and see if you can find something there. Maybe not, maybe so. You just have to play with the keywords. We’re here: “And how are they managing their privacy?” This is about how people who have jobs are managing their privacy, a great source for your infographic.

You can also head back to GoogleNews and add the word “study” to your keyword and this will bring up fresh results of studies that have come out recently related to social media. Again, you can still add operators to make your search more specific like “social media jobs study”. “New Study Says People Still Don’t Understand that their Online Lives Can Affect their Real Life”. This is a great angle. Sounds like this is a hot topic and against the grain, which tends to do well because everyone’s very gung ho about social media so this would be a great topic.

You can also just look up social media statistics. There is nothing wrong with that. That can bring up some great results because these people, like Ginny from HubSpot, has curated fresh stats about the current state of social media marketing. She has done a lot of the work for you so it’s just a matter of looking at her statistics, seeing which ones will fit in your infographic and then putting HubSpot as a source.

If you want to make sure your data is very fresh, you can always go to search tools anytime and put in the past month or past year if you want to make sure the statistics that you’re showing are relevant and current.

So, that’s it. This may seem like a lot of work but it’s very important. In my opinion, half of the battle when it comes to promoting your infographic, is choosing the right topic. If you use this strategy, you’ll find a timely, proven topic that will help you get more traffic and links from every infographic that you publish.